She's late," said Julian, our host, straightening a knife that didn't need straightening. He looked a little keyed up. I felt a little keyed up myself. We were standing in the back of the Four Seasons restaurant in a vast private dinning room lined with Lichtenstein prints and an acre of expensive carpet. Right in the center was one little table laid for two. Julian said, "We have a smaller room than this. Half the size. Ted Turner used it when he lunched with [discreet cough] and he didn't want to be overheard." He straightened a fork that didn't need straightening and said again, "She's late." I said, "Late! She's a rock star."

The Four Seasons is a high, patrician, moneyed space crammed with low-voiced, powerful men in handmade suits, and it was crying out, in my opinion, on an ordinary weekday in late fall, for some rock -star bad behavior. Late is nothing. I was ready for stumbling about, loud language, projectile vomiting, smeared mascara, trashy attitude, tattoos, tiaras. Serious bad taste. Danger. You get high on danger just from Courtney Love clippings file, never mind the lyrics of her songs. Death, drugs, doom, dismemberment, doll parts-ooh spooky. "Don't say anything bad about her," my tabloid-newspaper friend warned me hopefully. "She'll have you stalked. She'll find you on the Internet and hunt you down." His eyes lit up briefly at the thought; it was a slow news day.

Only three-quarters of an hour after the stipulated time, a tall and pretty woman, discreetly dressed in a black cashmere coat and Calvin's new block heels, appeared in the doorway. To my endless regret, she had caused no great stir as she walked swiftly through the restaurant. Men's heads had looked up briefly, taken in the pleasing sight of a blonde dressed with all the blue-blood chic of a 32-year-old Four Seasons habitué, and then looked back down at their seared tuna.

The first time I'd ever seen Courtney Love's face in closed-up, it was on my TV and it was smeared with lipstick and mascara, her huge blue eyes awash with tears. Barbara Walters sat opposite her, infinitely skilled, infinitely seductive, asking her if she was doing drugs: Heroin? Prozac? Anything?This morning? While pregnant? (she said no, no, no, no, and yes); asking her if she blamed herself for Kurt Cobain's suicide (yes); asking her if someone like her could call herself a good mother (yes). The widow Cobain sat in her house in Seattle on an overstuffed sofa, surrounded by haute bourgeois style: silk lampshades, gilt picture frames, brocade chairs. She sipped tea from a flowered porcelain cup, sobbed, sniffled, blew her nose, choked off her answers to excuse herself and weep for a minute, and answered everything that was put to her. She was styled halfway between Ivana Trump (little pink Thierry Mugler suit) and Courtney Love (visible black bra, smeared lipstick). Altogether, is was great TV, brilliantly done by both participants. "That was a year and a half ago!" she said now. "I don't want to talk about that. That was-opera. That woman is a Flaming Temptress. It was more than opera-it was Grand Guignol. It was gore theater and I was the leading lady and that is all. I did Lady Macbeth, all right? In front of 20 million people, there you go. You have to move out from there."

She has moved on. She took off her coat and revealed a plain black dress )Jil Sander"), chocolate-brown hose, and a little chocolate-brown cardigan ("From that modern label. Those P-R-A-D-A people"). If ever I needed proof of the fact that great clothes maketh the woman, I had it there in front of me. She sat down, and I made her stand up again immediately. She laughed. "I know. I break that rule that celebrities are always smaller than everyone else." She looks tall in the movie she'd come to publicize, Milos Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt, in which she stars with Woody Harrelson and Edward Norton. But everybody looks tall on the big-screen. Woody Harrelson could easily be a midget like Tom Cruise or Andy Garcia. "Nope," she said. "Regular size."

The real-life Larry Flynt is (a) notorious and (b) famous. Notorious because he's the scumbag publisher of a cheap-porn-magazine empire (Hustler, which published nude pictures of Jackie Onassis; Juggs; Busty Beauties, et al.) He was shot by a crazed gunman in 1978 and paralyzed from the waist down-perhaps the ultimate irony for a hard-core mogul. Famous because he single-handedly forced the Supreme Court into a landmark judgment on the First Amendment, thus underlining the fact that freedom of speech is a universal right for all Americans, not just the nice, well-bred, low-voiced ones who lunch at the Four Seasons. (Woody Harrleson, as Flynt, says on the courtroom steps. "If the First Amendment can protect a scumbag like me, it can protect all of you.")

Love plays Flynt's wife, Althea Leasure, a low-life tart with a heart of gold, who becomes a drug addict and succumbs to AIDS. She plays the role brilliantly, aging from almost eighteen to 30-something, visibly wasting away before out eyes. You may feel, as I did before I saw it, that playing a junkie would be easy for Courtney. There's a shooting-up scene that chills the blood, as cool-hand Love smacks away at veins and lengths of rubber tubing. I get the feeling she thought i would be easy, too. "I didn't think it would take any psychic energy. All my punk-rock friends put down acting as something really dilettante. But it was intense....Especially with my physicality. I lost 40 pounds. I got down to 103, 104 pounds. Milos told me, 'You're playing a junkie, you have to lose weight.'" (She also had to agree to a weekly drug test required by the insurance company; she was tested "for everything".) But if there's any justice, she should get an Oscar nomination for her performance: She lights up the screen in every scene she's in.

The People vs. Larry Flynt comes out the same week as Evita. Love put on a world-weary face and an ironic drawl to talk about Madonna. "Oh, it's not a compe-ti-tion. It's not. We're so different. She's so much the younger child, and I'm so much the older child-you know what I mean?" She returned to her real voice, her Older Child's voice, and said briskly, "That movie's going to be a musical extravaganza with great clothes. It'll be fun. It's like a cartoon. It's the perfect formal for her." She said she wasn't going to go down that road (of criticizing Madonna). "We're different. It's like-Eddie Bauer and Versace. It's a different buzz."

Milos Forman has made some pretty piquant casting choices in his movie. Alongside Love, there is Larry Flynt himself, who plays a judge, and politico James Carville, as a prosecutor, and Donna Hanover, who plays Ruth Carter Stapleton, Jimmy Cater's evangelical sister. Ms. Hanover is not a movie actress; she's a TV journalist on Good Day New York, but she's terrific in her role. Donna Hanover is also Mrs. Rudolph Guiliani, and my call to her was put into Graci Mansion, the residence of the mayor of New York City. She came bubbling down the line minutes after her husband gave the entire Yankee team the keys to the city. "Courtney was wonderful to work with," she said. "Very supportive. I had a difficult scene, and I suddenly felt this friendly little pressure from her hand on my back." Hanover had interviewed Larry Flynt years ago when she was working in Columbus, Ohio. "It was just after the nude Jackie pictures, I remember. He offered me a subscription to Hustler after the interview! I never met Althea, though I did get an invitation to their wedding. I couldn't go, for some reason, though of course I regret it now." When half the cast of the movie flew to visit Vaclav Havel in Prague (he's a lifelong friend of Milos Forman) on Larry Flynt's black jet, Flynt spent the journey watching hardcore videos while the rest of the party tried not to look. ("It was as bad as it gets," Love told me about the smut.)

Donna Hanover thinks the movie will play on "a lot of levels. It's a very political movie, and people think it raises some important issues. The First Amendment protects all of us." But curiously enough, her husband is at this very moment taking a high profile stand on hard-core porn, promising to close down 150 sex shops. My, how the world turns.

Love is impressed that "adults" like her work in Larry Flynt. Adults? "You know, grown-ups. People who get scared if their daughters have my records." And apropos of teenage daughters, she added, "I m not 103 pounds now, by the way," before bossily laying into me about anorexic models, the power of fashion magazines to determine national standards of body mass, and the rest of it. "I can't stand it, that whole thing-sitting around with your girlfriends and kvetching about weight. I takes all your confidence. It's really weird not to be on that diet anymore." What diet? "No carbohydrates. If somebody's going to pay me a lit of money to be 100 pounds and if there's a good reason for it and I'm not promoting anorexia, I'll do it. That's my big feminist lecture for today. I gave it to them yesterday in the studio."

She's spent the day before being photographed by Steven Meisel, surrounded by clothes. She's worked clothes till one in the morning, being fitted into clothes by Vogue editors who love for clothes; their clothes, your clothes, Helmut's clothes, Calvin's clothes-all the clothes in the world that come only sizes 1 to 6. Fashion people are easy to mock and easier to parody: We can all do Unzipped these days. Love stuck out her foot from under the table. She was playing an editor accessorizing Courtney Love in Versace. "Lose the shoe...No. It's just too....[long pause, cloud of smoke, wrinkled brow]shoe-y." She burst out laughing.

Love cares about clothes, too, and the bosomy baby-doll, kinderwhore , thrift-store frillies she's always worn onstage are now ionic: Anna Sui's spring/summer show was taking place as we spoke, where Sui busily mixed "Courtney Love with Stevie Nicks, because [according to the program notes] anybody can be a rock star." The clothes the fashion people were caring about most, at the height of the fall/winter season, were (a) modern and (b) asymmetrical. "Moderrrn!" said Love, blowing a cloud of smoke over her barely touched platter of pumpkin bisuqe. She dragged the word out until it dripped with faux-hostile sarcasm: "
So, in Meisel's studio, she'd swiftly hurled out the asymmetrical and jumped into the pretty, saying to me the nest day, "Vogue slagged off my tiara. They put 'Universal Bad:Tiaras.' And-excuse me- what did they put for 'Universal Good'? One shoulder? What is this? Blaine Trump? Ha! If they can slag off my tiara, I can slag off their asymmetrical."

In the flesh, Love ha s a sweetly pretty face and a knockout smile. She wore very little makeup, an only mascara and lip gloss, and Garen had chopped off her hair for the shoot. I imagine he used sissors on her rather than the steak knife and fork that she must normally employ, so her fashionably messy bob looked planned, as opposed to an act of nature. I told her she looked pretty, and she said, "Thank you.""I thought you'd be wrecked," I said. "Wrecked?" She threw me a look, pondering "wrecked". We were not to do drugs at the table, I'd been warned about 40 times. Drugs were a forbidden subject, not to be raised. "Worn out," I said, scrolling though all the drug-free adjectives I could think of. Sleepy. Tired! Exhausted! Fatigued from a long day in front of the camera! Yes, she conceded. It had been a hard day yesterday.

"I've learned only recently how to do clothes. When I had no money, I did thrift shop, and I always knew exactly what to buy. Then I got money, and I stopped doing thrift shop and started doing mall. I suddenly didn't know what to buy anymore. I bought that pink suit in Atlanta; I thought it was 'pretty'. I like 'pretty.'" She pulled a face. "It took me time to learn to shop with money. It was exactly the same with furniture. When I was doing the equivalent of thrift shop with furniture, I knew exactly what to have in my house. Then when I got money, I bout the wrong things. I bought into middle-class taste and I got things wrong-like, I would have 'antiques' and then realize that they were fake antiques. Reproduction antiques. Now I know what to buy. I've learned. My house is completely different now from when you saw it on Barbara Walters. A completely different style."

What style?

She put her glass down and said in a heavy drawl, "Miii-ssion." She looked up and said, "But you know what? I'm not going to apologize for it, because it's really nice. The Greene brothers and Frank Lloyd Wright. It's a Seattle box house, and Mission is perfect for that. So there." Her Seattle box house is usually full of women: not only four-year-old Frances Bean but her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, visiting and baby-sitting. And full of animals: Frances has a new kitten call Mittens, a rabbit called Ruby. "If you don't go out much, which I don't now, your house has to be more than a place you go to. It has to be as perfect as you can get it."

She is bittersweet about Seattle, the past, the desolate heritage of Kurt Cobain (she said of their daughter, Frances: "She has James Dean of a father"). But she's a strong woman, Courtney Love. And a brave survivor. Some people critizize her public display of raw grief and anger after Cobain's death. She read out parts of his anguished suicide note, raged at him, and cussed him out of his abandonment of her. But how could she keep her misery private? That bleak suicide flashed onto the worlds front pages within hours of its discovery, and it was the dying of a light for a whole generation. She's a rock star herself; she lives in public herself. She knows what fans are like: They kill for tickets, follow her across the world, input endlessly into their Web sites, talking abut her, talking to her, nodding over their keyboards and tapping out It's now 5:45 and I have to get some sleep but if anyone has anything to add....

She said, "I've never talked about my creative work, because I couldn't. I've always talked about my personal life because I didn't value it as much. Now I value it. I went to see Oasis....I felt sorry for the,. And you no why? Forget they're obnoxious, forget all that...everyone hate them. They think that they're the biggest band in the world. They think-it's way to huge. They think it's never going to end. And it's a battle. And every day is a war. And this was like two days after the video awards, and they ended up not going out to any parties or having any fun, because they were scared. And I've been there! I've seen it! When it's new, and you hate everybody and you just want to, like, lick everybody, and famous people want to meet you and you just want to say Fuck you." She looked at the tape machine. "I'm really not into saying that work in this interview." I told her I'd leave it out. "It's really boo-oot camp to say that work all the time," she said, laughing out loud herself. "But, you know, I really got sad. I was with my friend who'd opened for them, and I really cried for them. It was such a sad night, you know? All the drugs and not having any fun."

You have to move from there. Going to see Oasis did that to me. I wanted to tell them-it's going to end! It's going to end, you guys!" She didn't tell them. "No point. They were in a state where they'd have been sassy and stupid, because they can't see the forest for the tress. They're just looking at a leaf." But she can tell herself, and does. "It's OK, it's OK. I look back on it now, and it;s all so mainstream and entertaining to grownups and nobody cares and you can just go about your business and make you music and -the end. You know you can walk into a lobby, and it's not icky and nobody picks on you. People stare because you're famous. But you could be Michael Douglas! It gets way better, and it's fine. It's just about preserving your creativity and doing everything you can."

She's such a survivor. For two hours straight, she gave me the Surprising New Courtney Love. Pretty on the outside, pretty on the inside. Well mannered, witty. (Very witty: After she had a fling with the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails, she promptly renamed the band Three Inch Nails.) She had handlers now, personal publicists, record publicist, film publicist. She is not hanging around with her tiara-wearing friends an getting wasted. She's dropping in to tea at Gracie Mansion with her New Best Friend, the mayor's wife. She was recently drawn into a land war against the city of Seattle, alongside Howard "Starbucks" Schultz, who lives in the same posh neighborhood. But guess who came out smelling like roses? The widow Cobain, great neighbor, good citizen.

"The city's on my side," she said. "I'm restoring my house back to the way it was in 1902. Believe it or not, everybody thinks I'm a great neighbor. And Howard is building a Habitrial over there! See through plastic! Modules! Moderrrrn! And the city's backing me! You see?" She looked at me, laughing. "Nobody likes modern!"

Email: jacqui_missworld@hotmail.com